(Excerpted from an article on the New York Times website)

October 6, 2009, 11:31 am

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Over the Summer, a Spread of Thicker Arctic Ice

By Andrew C. Revkin

The National Snow and Ice Data Center released its summary of summer sea-ice conditions in the Arctic on Tuesday, noting  a substantial expansion of the extent of “second-year ice” — floes thick enough to have persisted through two summers of melting. The result could be a reprieve, at least for a while, from the recent stretch of  remarkable summer meltdowns.

According to the center, second-year ice this summer made up 32 percent of the total ice cover on the Arctic Ocean, compared with 21 percent in 2007 and 9 percent in 2008. The percentage of ice that was many years old, forming thick pancaked expanses, was at its lowest since satellite observations began 30 years ago. But that could change next year as the second-year ice adds mass through the long winter freeze. ...

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Thanks to Rakesh for suggesting this article. -ra

(Excerpted from an article on the New York Times website)

Op-Ed Columnist

Cassandras of Climate

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.

And here’s the thing: I’m not engaging in hyperbole. These days, dire warnings aren’t the delusional raving of cranks. They’re what come out of the most widely respected climate models, devised by the leading researchers. The prognosis for the planet has gotten much, much worse in just the last few years.

What’s driving this new pessimism? ...   more »

(Excerpted from an article on the MIT Technology Review website)

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

With a new purchase, GE is betting on an early-stage turbine technology that could make offshore wind farms cheaper to maintain. The acquisition of ScanWind, based in Trondheim, Norway, has also secured GE a foothold in the growing offshore wind energy market.

Instead of gearboxes, ScanWind uses a novel direct-drive generator technology in its 3.5-megawatt turbines. This makes the turbines more reliable, the company says, by cutting downtime and repair costs--an especially important consideration for turbines offshore, where it's more expensive to send technicians for maintenance. ScanWind has been testing the turbines on the Norwegian coast since 2003.

GE, based in Fairfield, CT, is the world's second-largest maker of wind turbines, with more than 12,000 turbines installed globally. But GE's offshore wind energy portfolio has been minimal so far, and the company wants to expand its offshore offerings. By acquiring ScanWind, transferring its expertise and understanding of onshore wind, and adding technologies such as remote monitoring and sensing, GE hopes it can make a solid, cost-effective offshore wind product. ...

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(Excerpted from an article on the MIT Technology Review website)

Nanosolar's new factory could help lower the price of solar power, if the market cooperates.

A promising type of solar-power technology has moved a step closer to mass production. Nanosolar, based in San Jose, CA, has opened an automated facility for manufacturing its solar panels, which are made by printing a semiconductor material called CIGS on aluminum foil. The manufacturing facility is located in Germany, where government incentives have created a large market for solar panels. Nanosolar has the potential to make 640 megawatts' worth of solar panels there every year.

Solar cells made of the CIGS semiconductor, which is composed of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium, have long been considered a potential challenger to conventional solar cells made of silicon. At least in the lab, CIGS cells have reached efficiencies comparable to silicon-based solar cells. And in theory, they could be made using inexpensive printing processes, leading to much less expensive solar power. But developing manufacturing processes that maintain the high efficiencies has proven difficult.

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Bruno Latour (1947-) is Professor and vice-president for research at the Institut d'études Politiques de Paris. Latour is a leading and very influential anthropologist of Modernity whose major contribution may be called holistic politcal epistemology. This, for Latour, is not a form of idealism, but what, following William James, he calls "radical empiricism." Latour is (in)famous for his pronouncement "We have never been modern." By this he means that the overarching hubris of modernity for human autonomy and mastery is a sub-narrative in a larger embeddedness in holistic properties which is only beginning to make its imperative critical demands on human attention. This emergence depends on the recognition of a change of telos and and a political epistemology of interdisciplinarity which takes humanity beyond itself into the fullness of global embodiment. In this essay, he reflects on environmentalism, society, technology and theology. - db   more »

Erik Davis is one of the most talented authors writing on the subject of technology, culture, and spirituality. This article from the book prefiguring cyberculture from MIT University Press is representative of the insightful work he has done. The concern of this piece revolves around the construction of subjectivity in an epoch which can perhaps best be called posthuman.rc

Of all the lumbering giants of the Western philosophical tradition, none resembles a punching bag more than René Descartes. He gets it from all sides: cognitive scientists and phenomenologists, post-structuralists and deep ecologists, lefty science critics and New Age holists. The main beef, of course, is the stark divide that Descartes drew between mind and body, a dualism that, by its very claim of rationality, now appears even more obscene than the religious dualisms that stretch back to Zarathustra. Nearly across the board, contemporary thought calls us to defend and affirm the body that Descartes rendered a machine, a soulless automata under our spiritual thumb. It doesn't really matter that the body so affirmed is itself multiple and even contradictory: the materialist object of biology, the phenomenological bed of Being, a feminist site of anti-patriarchal critique, the New Age animal immersed in Gaia's enchanted web. Regardless of the framework, the song remains the same: we are bodyminds deeply embedded in the world. For many thinkers now, the sort of abstract, disengaged soul-pilot pictured by Descartes -- the "I" immortalized in the famous cogito ergo sum -- is not only bad thinking, but, ideologically speaking, bad news.

In many ways I share this urge to trace the networks that embed consciousness in phenomenal reality, and to insist on the extraordinary (though not exclusive) value of causal explanations rooted in the history of matter. But I am no absolutist. The fact that Descartes keeps popping up like a Jack-in-the-box suggests that a splinter of the cogito remains in our minds, some fragmentary intuition or insightful glimpse that we cannot accommodate and so wall off in order to reject. I am not interested in philosophically defending the cogito, or at least the metaphysical cogito we are familiar with: the rational and disengaged instrumentalist manipulating the empty machinery of matter. But I am interesting in probing for that splinter, which I suspect is lodged somewhere in the apparently yawning gap between self-conscious awareness and the phenomenal world -- a gap that, despite some hearty attacks from nondualists East and West, continues to inform subjectivity. ....   more »

Money is meant to circulate. What should remain constant is the progressive movement of an increase in the earth’s production – an ever-expanding progressive movement to increase the earth’s production and improve existence on earth. It is the material improvement of terrestrial life and the growth of the earth’s production that must go on expanding, enlarging, and not this silly paper or this inert metal that is amassed and lifeless.....   more »

A new study finds that the strongest of hurricanes and typhoons have become even stronger over the last two and a half decades...

“I think we do see a climate signal here,” said James B. Elsner, a professor of geography at Florida State University who is the lead author of the paper, being published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The study, which also found that more typical, less powerful tropical storms had not become stronger over the 26-year period studied, is consistent with other researchers’ hurricane models, Dr. Elsner said.

With oceans expected to continue warming, “one would expect more 4s and 5s,” he said of Category 4 and Category 5 hurricanes, those with maximum sustained winds of at least 131 miles per hour. ...   more »

As the mortgage and financial crisis continues to notch more victims, the question on many economists' minds is not whether a recession will happen, but how deep it will get and how long it will last. But one prominent voice thinks the high-flying finance industry isn't going to bounce back -- and that we'll need to look elsewhere to set the U.S. economy back on firm footing.

Eric Janszen is an angel investor and founder of the contrarian market website iTulip.com, which The New York Times credited with "accurately predicting that the [internet] bubble would pop." Now Janszen believes the American economy needs a fundamental restructuring away from its foundations in finance, insurance and real estate. His prescription: a new bubble based on green technologies. In a widely discussed Harper's article in February, "The Next Bubble: Priming the Markets for Tomorrow's Crash," Janszen argued that clean tech is the only sector that could create enough "fictitious value" to replace the losses from the housing bubble, if only temporarily. ...   more »

...We need another wealth-generating economic bubble. And that, said Novogratz, must come -- can only come -- from new energy sources and green technology.

"As the price of oil goes up, there's got to be a green revolution. I think of what will be the next driver of the American economy, and it's green energy. That's a huge growth opportunity. It's not about the pollution. It's about the energy. Gas will go to $10 a gallon," he said. ...   more »

The oil age began in 1860. By 2006 the world¹s oil rigs pumped oil at a rate of 85 million barrels a day. They haven¹t come close since, even as prices have risen to more than $100 per barrel. -- Breaking our fossil fuel dependency will require plugging into the grid instead of pulling up to the pump. And there are some interesting energy options and others are doing a lot more about developing them than Americans.

Germany leads the world in its installed capacity of renewable energy sources (25 percent), and is the third largest producer of solar panels after China and Japan. -- The share of electricity generated from renewable sources exceeded 14 percent in 2007, an increase from 11 percent in 2006. This means that Germany has already met the European Union¹s target that 12.5 percent of electricity should come from renewable sources by 2010. -- Enercon, a major wind equipment maker, claims that the renewable-energy business will become a major part of the country¹s manufacturing business, alongside cars and machine tools. Employment in the renewables industry is now 250,000 ands expected to double by 2020. Throughout Germany, around 160 technical institutions are doing research on alternative energy. ...   more »

...The transition model emboldens communities to look peak oil and climate change squarely in the eye and unleash the collective genius of their own people to find the answers to this big question: for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how are we going to:

    * significantly rebuild resilience (in response to peak oil)
    * drastically reduce carbon emissions (in response to climate change)?

Typically, self-determined solutions will involve some flavour of relocalisation. -- We're building a range of materials, training courses, events, tools & techniques, resources and a general support capability to help these communities. ... We're hoping that through this work, communities across the UK will unleash their own collective genius and embark on an imaginative and practical range of connected initiatives, leading to a way of life that is more resilient, more fulfilling and more equitable, and that has dramatically lower levels of carbon emissions. ...   more »

This is Chapter 6 of SCIY Editor Wm. H. Kötke's recently reprinted Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. It's so relevant to SCIY's core concerns that, with William's full support and permission, we're going to be serializing all 20 chapters here on SCIY (at an average rate of a chapter per week). -- To see the first five chapters, go to:

• Chapter 1: Pattern of the Crisis
• Chapter 2: The End of Civilization
• Chapter 3: Soil-The Basis of Life
• Chapter 4: The Forest
• Chapter 5: The Phantom Agriculture

I hope you find this book as interesting and important as I have,

~ ronjon

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This is Chapter 5 of SCIY Editor Wm. H. Kötke's recently reprinted Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. It's so relevant to SCIY's core concerns that, with William's full support and permission, we're going to be serializing all 20 chapters here on SCIY (at an average rate of a chapter per week). -- To see the first four chapters, go to:

• Chapter 1: Pattern of the Crisis
• Chapter 2: The End of Civilization
• Chapter 3: Soil-The Basis of Life
• Chapter 4: The Forest

I hope you find this as interesting and important as I have,

~ ronjon   more »

...Commodities have often been the refuge for investors who have lost money on equities or fixed-income investments. Moreover, the commodities rush today is not limited to oil; now we also have runaway food and feed prices. Could it be that all the financial losses on subprime mortgages, plus the anticipation that the option ARM mortgages about to reset could be an even bigger problem, combined with the huge losses in securities last year, are why investment money today is flooding into often unregulated commodities, where the demand pricing of the final goods is inelastic? Consider this: You may not buy gasoline or even eat today, but by next Monday you'll probably have to do both, no matter what it costs. Basically, besides enabling the Fed to bail out Wall Street and our banks again, every time you gas up or eat you may be paying investors to cover other financial losses. We know that investors can't control their losses on mortgages, securities, or bad loans. But, demonstrably, if not restrained they can drive up the price of goods that we can't get out of buying. Odds are, that's what's really been going on. ...   more »